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Facebook Outage Causes Outrage

Early Wednesday night, Gulf Standard Time (GST), Facebook found itself facing the biggest outage in its history as users reported glitches across its services, including Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook Workspace and Oculus.

The social media giant has still not declared the reason behind the outage, but speculation has been rife since it began, with analysists, experts and frustrated users taking to Twitter using the hashtags #FacebookDown and #InstagramDown—both of which were trending into the early hours of Thursday morning.

Many suggested it was the result of a hacking attempt through a DDos attack (Distributed Denial-of-Service), which is when an overwhelming number of user accounts flood a company’s server with requests, causing it to use up all of its resources and shut down. However, Facebook has also turned to Twitter to deny that this is the case. Tweeting 23:00hrs GST, “We’re focused on working to resolve the issue as soon as possible, but can confirm that the issue is not related to a DDoS attack.”

At the time of writing, the company had not provided any further updates.

The outage has not only affected normal users but also millions of business account holders, with Facebook Workspace—a platform largely used to connect a company’s employees across the globe—also reporting problems.

Facebook’s flagship social network has more than 2.3 billion users, and Instagram has more than 1 billion.

As services slowly return to normal, time will tell what the price of the mystery disruption will be in terms of reputation and finance—to businesses, advertisers, and Facebook itself.